Absence
by KitKatt0430
Summary: Of all the things Kurogane expected to lose in order to fulfill his wish and save Fay, it was what the Witch did not demand – and did not take – that hurt the most upon losing it.


**Disclaimer** – I don't own Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.

**Summary** - Of all the things Kurogane expected to lose in order to fulfill his wish and save Fay, it was what the Witch did not demand – and did not take – that hurt the most upon losing it.

**A/N** – I like the Kuro/Fay pairing, but this story can be seen as pre-slash or friendship, whichever you prefer. The dialogue is from chapter 130, the scene where Fay awakens as a vampire for the first time.

_**Absence**_

Kurogane had seen enough of the vampire twins to know that yellow eyes meant that either they were fighting or they were angry or both. So when he saw Fay was waking up, he trained his stare on the blonde man's lone eye. He hoped to see blue – to see that Fay wasn't too mad about having his life saved – but had resigned himself to yellow. Fay's past must have been devastating to give the otherwise happy-go-lucky, irritatingly cheerful man such a strong death wish.

Whatever the reason, Fay had truly wanted to die.

Kurogane had never felt so angry in his life. Though he was angry with the old Syaoran for hurting Fay, the new Syaoran for not sealing the heart in the old Syaoran better, and the man whose crest was upon the new Syaoran's clothes for ruining his childhood (and apparently the childhood of the new Syaoran as well), it was Fay who had incurred the majority of Kurogane's now waning rage. It was Fay's insistence that they let him die that had made Kurogane dent the wall lest he hurt the already dying mage and shake that stubborn idiot roughly as though the action might force some sense into the man's clearly addled brain.

Didn't Fay understand that they couldn't lose him… that Kurogane could not lose him? They needed his smile and jokes and ridiculous nicknames. They needed his spirit and intelligence and hidden bursts of magic. More than anything, though, they needed Fay to just be there because they cared too much.

Fay's eye flickered open for a second; the iris was yellow and oval, like a cat. In a way, the look was incredibly appropriate. The capricious blonde had once taken the alias of 'Big Kitty' once before, after all.

Fay closed his eye again and stretched before sitting up. His actions were slow and somewhat labored; despite his new vampire blood, Fay was still mending and in pain. Kurogane knew that he was also angry and that anger dulled the senses and made people react slower if they let it control them instead of the other way around.

Instead, Fay's eye opened again and shined blue. For the first time, Kurogane finally, truly accepted that so much of what he'd seen of Fay was a mask to hide behind. Though he'd seen the cracks and the pain behind them in the past, the easy disguise of Fay's anger made him wonder how many other times the mage had been upset over something and blown it off as inconsequential. Somewhere in his chest, a heavy, constrictive feeling began to descend on Kurogane.

A small smile appeared on Fay's face and his eye shuttered closed again for a brief moment. "Good morning, Kurogane," Fay chirped brightly.

Kurogane flinched, though at first he didn't know why. Fay sounded happy enough and looked just as pleased to see him. Except… there had been no outlandish nickname.

It was absolutely absurd. Kurogane had hated the way Fay shortened his name and tacked embarrassing honorifics – if honor could truly be attributed through them – to the end. Every time it happened, he'd attempted to correct the blonde; it hadn't helped that Mokona had felt the need to imitate Fay's childishness. So Kurogane didn't understand why it hurt so much to hear his name pronounced perfectly, just the way he'd always insisted upon.

Except… he did know. The nicknames and the silly arguments over them – all of which Fay inevitably won simply by not acquiescing to Kurogane's demands – had become a welcome distraction from the strange, wondrous, and dangerous situations they had found themselves in. As the worlds constantly changed around them and even their clothing differed from place to place, Fay's teasing had remained the same. Now, when Kurogane needed that stability more than ever… needed _something_ to keep him hating himself for letting Sakura go into danger alone, to stop the rage from nearly losing Fay, to soothe the odd ache of simultaneously losing one Syaoran and gaining another, to keep himself from questioning his motives in saving Fay's life…

Now, when he needed Fay to be there as his friend the most, the blonde's remaining blue eye had turned to ice. The nicknames, a verbal representation of their friendship and an excuse to be as snarky as they wanted to be, had vanished. The camaraderie and familiarity had been snatched out from beneath him.

Yuko had tried to warn him, but he'd unwittingly brushed it off. Her words had been a gift in a way; she'd given him a chance to shield himself from the pain of Fay's absence… the way _he'd lost Fay_ without _losing Fay_.

"Don't move," Kurogane said, as if referring to the blonde's pain. _Don't leave me behind,_ he meant. _Don't hate me for wanting to keep you in my life._

"I'm not going to run away," Fay laughed. He grinned, as though nothing had changed.

Kurogane grabbed a nearby blanket, yanking it around and over Fay's head. He couldn't stay here with this friend turned stranger. He couldn't deal with the silence that surrounded them and the unvoiced accusations they both held inside.

As much as he hated to admit it, Kurogane was running away for a little bit. The blanket was his excuse; he was giving it to Syaoran so that he could cover that accursed symbol on his clothes.

"Don't move around yet," he clarified gruffly, stalking away towards Syaoran.

Yuko may not have demanded the comradeship that had grown between Kurogane and the only other adult in their group, but it had been taken in payment just the same. Not even losing Ginryuu had hurt so much.

Stupid mage…

**A/N** – The relationship between Fay and Kurogane is complex, even if all you see is friendship between them instead of the possibility of more. I can only hope that I conveyed that complexity properly. That scene always felt so charged to me and, though I couldn't tell what was going through Fay's mind, I could tell that Kurogane felt something akin to being slapped by a trusted confidant from the expressions on his face when Fay used his name properly.

**Odd little soul mate theory for Kuro/Fay (feel free to skip) **- Considering the fact that death in Kurogane's world was common and the events of Fay's original world – which I don't want to spoil for anyone – it's likely that Kurogane's counterpart in Fay's world died and Fay's counterpart in Kurogane's world died as well. Since the soul remains the same from world to world, the idea that Kurogane and Fay could be soul mates is not as farfetched or impossible as some shippers of the Kuro/Fay pairing seem to fear. Really, I see no reason why the fact that they're from different worlds should matter at all. As the characters have witnessed in their travels, the worlds are all large places and the fact that they've run into so many familiar faces/souls has been more due to hitsuzen (as Yuko would call it) than anything else. Each world contains a version of a soul, thus increasing the chances that the soul will connect with its mate. Dimension hopping seems like an inevitable extension of that. A part of the soul in a world where its other half has died might very well feel driven to move from world to world in search of one where it died and its mate survived. Obviously, this wouldn't be a conscious part of the decision to travel the dimensions, but it could definitely contribute to it.


End file.
